Using Access Methods

All the access methods described in this document allow you to do the following:

Share a data set among different systems, different jobs in a single system, multiple access method control blocks (ACBs) or data control blocks (DCBs) in a task, or different subtasks in an address space. See Sharing VSAM Data Sets for information about sharing a VSAM data set. See Sharing Non-VSAM Data Sets for information about sharing a non-VSAM data set.
Share buffers and control blocks among VSAM data sets. See Sharing Resources Among VSAM Data Sets.
Provide user exit routines to analyze logical and physical errors, and to perform end-of-data processing. See Using Non-VSAM User-Written Exit Routines and Coding VSAM User-Written Exit Routines.
Back up and recover data sets. See Backing Up and Recovering Data Sets.
Maintain data security and integrity. See Protecting Data Sets.

BSAM, QSAM, BPAM, and VSAM convert between record-oriented data and byte-stream oriented data that is stored in UNIX files.

Non-VSAM access methods also let you: